repair usb drive

nice article in linux-journal

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8366


How a Corrupted USB Drive Was Saved by GNU/Linux
June 14th, 2005 by Collin Park in

* HOWTOs

Would SUSE and fsck be able to recover the data in a usable way?
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My friend's brother had a 512MB Lexar Media Jumpdrive Pro USB drive that became corrupted after using it with Windows 2000. His IT department was able to get back some but not all of the file contents, but without any file names. On his own, he tried some recovery utilities, but all failed. Using a typical Linux distro--in this case SuSE 8.0--however, it wasn't hard to recover almost all of the data from the drive along with the filenames and to burn a CD-ROM of the contents.
USB Drive Ruined by Windows

Here's what I heard about the data loss:

Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:06:03 -0700
Subject: USB

... My USB drive is a
Lexar Media USB Jumpdrive Pro 2.0 (512 MB). I was working
on it in a computer with Windows 2000 and logged off before
ejecting the drive. Next time when I tried to use it,
it showed up as a Removable drive rather than the usual
Lexar Media drive and when I tried to open it, it said the
drive was not formatted; and under Properties, 0 bytes free
and used space and file system "RAW"

According to Lexar tech support, there is a bug with
Windows 2000 (that MS never bothered to fix) and can corrupt
the drive when it is removed without proper eject. They
recommend EasyRecovery Pro for data recovery which did
allow me to recover some files (> 500) using their RAW data
recovery program (all other tool failed because usually
said "no recognizable file on disc"). Unfortunately,
all the file names are lost and some files are gone.


The big questions was "can Linux read the drive?" A Web search of "linux usb jumpdrive pro" gave me hope that my kernel, 2.4.18 on SuSE 8.0, would recognize the drive in question. So, as root, I typed:

# tail -f /var/log/messages


and plugged the drive into a USB socket. Here's what appeared; I removed "Aug 5 01:32:15 linux kernel:" from each line below):

usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
scsi0 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 1313
Vendor: LEXAR Model: JUMPDRIVE PRO Rev: 0
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
SCSI device sda: 1001952 512-byte hdwr sectors (513 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: sda1
WARNING: USB Mass Storage data integrity not assured
USB Mass Storage device found at 4
USB Mass Storage support registered.


also according to one of the responders can try
http://www.brzitwa.de/mb/gpart/

MPX merged into X!! multi user mouse ideas

would like to use multiple mice at once

MPX for X gives multiple input devices multipointer x server
can convert already created applications to multipoint


http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=32dde4535c5ff99aacf474b8db4d4a54&showtopic=574028&pid=588710663&st=0&#entry588710663

now look at this

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=node/144
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2008-May/035641.html

For those of you watching xorg-commits, you may have noticed that MPX has been
merged into master [1].
The client-side libraries and protocol headers have been merged quietly last
week already, this time is just the xserver itself.

A change in the previously proposed schedule [2]: the XKB rework didn't make
it. With the recent SSL issue and other workloads, Daniel wasn't able to get
it ready in time. We agreed on merging MPX without it, as it should not affect
XKB much anyway.

A number of changes went in since the announce, the most important being the
return of input device cordinate scaling. Tablets can thus be used. Thanks to
Magnus Vigerloef for his help on this matter.

The input ABI has been bumped and all the input drivers on fdo have been
updated to compile with the new API. You will need to get the latest version
however. I don't think the ABI will remain stable until the next release, but
I figured input modules not loading encourages people to fetch the latest
release rather than complaining about them not compiling anymore.

The video ABI has not been bumped yet, but you _must recompile_ your video
driver. No API changes, a recompile is enough.

As previously mentioned, existing setups should not be affected and anything
that changes is most likely a bug. Unless you create additional cursors/foci,
in which case the border between bug and broken UI paradigm is somewhat
blurry.

For the impatient, run the following commands:
Update xorg/app/xinput to the most recent version.

xinput --list --short
xinput --create-master "foobar"
xinput --reattach "MyMouse" "foobar pointer"
xinput --reattach "MyKeyboard" "foobar keyboard"

It is at this point you have a second set of devices that work independently.
It is at this point that you may realise that neither GNOME, KDE, nor any
other environment actually works decently with multiple devices. So start
fixing them right now.

To go back to a standard setup:

xinput --reattach "MyMouse" "Virtual core pointer"
xinput --reattach "MyKeyboard" "Virtual core keyboard"
xinput --remove-master "foobar pointer"

Have fun. Input bugs that result from the MPX merge can be assigned to me.
So long, and thanks for all the mice.

Cheers,
Peter

outrageous!